![]() ![]() Love between a straight man and a trans woman seems to be as untenable as the sex between them isn’t. We may hope all we want for her straight cis counterpart to forgive her for her trans-ness and consummate their love. Thus, Private Desert doesn’t escape many of the toxic narrative traditions that have informed depictions of trans woman as an inevitably catfishing bearer of a shocking, if not disgusting, secret. Daniel, it seems, is too brutal even for the Brazilian police. And the man who comes to the trans woman’s encounter already bears the traces of an agent of violence: Daniel is the subject of brutality par excellence as a member of the police academy, the son of a police officer himself, and he sports a cast on his forearm for most of the film, alluding to an enigmatic assault he was involved in, which may cost him his job for good. Always the mise-en-scène tells us that death-ness and trans-ness bear the intimacy of Siamese sisters. Nobody is dead yet by the time Sara and Daniel finally meet, but the path toward the trans woman’s manifestation is still shrouded in death, and the predictably scandalous revelation of her trans-ness. And she only materializes beyond a fleeting voice in an audio message once she ghosts Daniel, triggering him to drop everything and drive from Curitiba to Petrolina, almost 2,000 miles, to find her. It isn’t until Sara shows up that the film snaps out of one-dimensional tedium. Daniel is your typically butch heterosexual man with zero emotional intelligence and a repressed stance that stiffens him into a cardboard character. Muritiba’s film initially focuses on Daniel, a police officer living in southern Brazil who’s on unpaid leave following a violent incident, and who’s obsessed with the beautiful girl on the other side of the screen. What if someone recognizes Sara at the club as Robson behind her make-up and wig? And how to sustain her remote relationship with Daniel (Antonio Saboia), the romantic partner who lives thousands of miles away, and with whom she exchanges WhatsApp messages all day without having ever met him in person, presuming she’s a cis woman? The rare instances of private and semi-public feminine embodiment are, for Sara, full of joy-the film’s cinematography itself takes on a dreamy sheen when we see her dressed up-but also anxiety. Aly Muritiba’s Private Desert partially overcomes such myopic notions of trans lived experience by portraying the ephemeral trans feminine practices of Sara (Pedro Fasanaro), a blue-collar worker in the northeast of Brazil living as a male, Robson, during the day, only able to indulge in her womanhood online and on the occasional dance floor. ![]() It normally involves the binary presumption of a linear, fixed, and necessary transition, which a hot straight cis guy isn’t initially privy to. Tags: Nature, Adventure, Life Lessons, For Middle School. Cinema’s forays into the lives of trans people are almost always marked by a limited understanding, or fantasy, of what “trans” is. Thank you to Dusti Bowling and NetGalley for sharing a DRC in exchange for an honest review.
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